Mining and Art

One of the goals of Traffic is to add more Dynamic Art. Art which is integrated into the game play.

When you visit an asteroid mine now, it tends to be surrounded by floating asteroids and rocks and stuff. Those other asteroids are just for show. They have no game purpose. They cannot be mined (even if some of them are larger than the asteroid mine itself).

EricMan64 had a nice mining simulation. It had lots of floating rocks. Some were valuable, and some not.

We might consider doing something similar. Basically, a mine would be surrounded by chunks of floating rock. Some have ore, some do not. A prospector ship can tell the difference by docking and looking for metals. Once it finds an ore rock, the rock can be "processed".

Mining rigs process ore rocks into cargo pods of ore. Rigs move from rock to rock chewing them into nothing. Better mining rigs convert rocks faster.

A mine starts with a limited number of ore rocks depending on the "richness" of the mine. When they are gone, the mine is "dead". You cannot tell a dead mine from a valuable one without spending time looking at the rocks. And the game economy progresses, the inner system mines will be depleted, pushing miners into the outer systems.

A prospecting player has several ways to earn funds from prospecting. They can sell the claim to the whole asteroid mine. The value of the claim will be based on the number of ore rocks found. The more ore, the more money.

A prospecting player could also locate the ore rocks, and then haul smaller ones to a mining rig to get processed. The player can thus make some funds, but not as much as by hiring his own rig.

A typical mining operation would have a cental processing ship, and then some tugs (or drones) that prospect and pull in ore chunks.

It would also be possible to steal ore using your tug. And possible for others to steal yours.

I liked this idea very much. Hearkens back to my original thoughts on how a mining operation would work. Using it to supplement the system we have alread in US would be cool.

If asteroids could be depleted, you could have the asteroid fields deplete and grow smaller with time. Thus many of the inner systems might have sparse fields, whereas outer, or newer systems would have dense ones.

Rotating asteroids could not be docked to, thus perhaps we could have the miner/mining rig actually start 'attacking' the asteroid with a mining beam. Essentially carving it up into chunks suitable for processing. This would make for an interesting and immersive scene if one happened to fly into a field with numerous frog miner sized ships flying about, carving up asteroids.

Or perhaps rotating asteroids could actually be stopped somehow to allow them to be docked to? Not sure if that is possible, or how much work it might take. Didn't we have a grapple of somekind at one point?

I also like the idea of a typical mining operation having central processing ship. We could integrate that with what we have, if we figured that the current mine setup produced 'raw' materials which would then be shipped to a pre-processing ship or plant, and from there to a processing station. That would add a step to our economy though. A 'central processing ship' type station would be much more interesting visually, as you would could see the tugs, drones and frog miners working in the surrounding field, bringing materials back to the central processing ship/station. Could be very very cool. Definitely immersive.

I keep forgetting that no one has seen the current system yet. The ideas flow while coding USpace, and it is best to jot them down when fresh or they just get lost by the time we need them.

I had not thought about the rotation. The grapple is a good idea. And might be useful for rescue operations or something as well.

On the other hand, blowing stuff up is fun. I enjoyed using mining charges and beams in GoldRush to cut up asteroids.

I would like to see a new Mining Fleet Operation created that travels from mine to mine. It would be created around a central ship, and have supporting ships (much like the player does). Any kind of change that gives a reason for all the small ships/drones would work.